Is love the same across time and around the world? Not so, says Eric Selinger—and what counted as love in one time or place might get you locked up in another! To understand just how many things “love” can mean, Selinger says we need to “go to anthropologists, historians, sociologists, people for whom difference is everything.”

If there are universal attributes to love, they must reside somewhere deep in our biological inheritance. Biological anthropologist Helen Fisher studies love across cultures, and does brain scans of lovers at all stages in relationships. Here’s her TED talkon the findings.

But when she had crossed the stone sill, she sat down by the far wall in the firelight, opposite Odysseus, while he sat by a tall pillar, his eyes on the ground, waiting to see if his wife would speak as she looked at him. She sat there silently for a long time...

— Homer's Odyssey, Book XXIII, A. S. Kline translation

Odysseus und Penelope by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein

Greek philosophy may have idealized Eros, a love based on desire, but Classics professor Margaret Toscano says that the reunion between Odysseus and Penelope at the end of Homer’s Odyssey is more like a miniature romance novel, based on courtship, friendship, and sexual mutuality. Here’s a prose translation of Book XXIII, where they meet again at last. How ancient or modern does their night together seem?

Neither the herbs of Medea nor the incantations of the Marsi will make love endure. If there were any potency in magic, Medea would have held the son of Æson, Circe would have held Ulysses. Philtres, too, that make the face grow pale, are useless when administered to women. They harm the brain and bring on madness. Away with such criminal devices! If you’d be loved, be worthy to be loved. 

To every captive soul and gentle heartinto whose sight this present speech may come,so that they might write its meaning for me,greetings, in their lord’s name, who is Love.Already a third of the hours were almost pastof the time when all the stars were shining,when Amor suddenly appeared to mewhose memory fills me with terror.Joyfully Amor seemed to me to holdmy heart in his hand, and held in his armsmy lady wrapped in a cloth sleeping.Then he woke her, and that burning hearthe fed to her reverently, she fearing,afterwards he went not to be seen weeping.

Passion makes the old medicine new:Passion lops off the bough of weariness.Passion is the elixir that renews:how can there be wearinesswhen passion is present?Oh, don’t sigh heavily from fatigue:seek passion, seek passion, seek passion!

— "Masnavi: Teachings of Rumi." trans. by E.H. Whinfield

From the 1990s well into the early 2000s, the bestselling poet in the United States was a 13th century Sufi mystic, Jalaluddin Rumi. Around the world, Rumi’s poems of sacred love have inspired novels, music, and documentary films, as well as spiritual seekers—even as debate swirls about how much of Rumi’s Muslim faith gets lost in the most popular English translations. In 2014, the BBC took note of Rumi’s celebrity status.

Husbands and wives didn’t always think that marriage should be “romantic.” Sociologist Eva Illouz explains that advertisers in the 1920s and ‘30s introduced that goal to American consumers, and used coverage of celebrity marriages—especially film stars—to reinforce the ideal.